1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cell culture apparatus for culturing a cell using a culture solution and various gases, particularly to a cell culture apparatus in which a cell growth process is observed and cells is mass-produced and easily cultured without much time and effort by using an automatic system, and a mass automatic cell culture device having it.
2. Background of Technique
Cell culture comprises aseptically cutting off tissue sections from multicellular organisms and providing nutritive components to them, followed by incubation for cell proliferation in a vessel. The tissues of plants can be immortally proliferated.
A cell culture method includes a coverglass method, a flask method, a rotating tube method and the like. Generally, endosperm, leukocyte or spleen extracts are used to promote the growth of cultured tissues while its essential materials are not clearly elucidated yet. Recently, an antibiotic or an eagle culture solution containing vitamins and amino acids are often used.
The tissue culture permits a single cell to culture to a cell population, a small organ or a plant tissue.
The culture of living cells in a test tube is performed for various purposes, for example, recovery of additional by-products generated by cellular metabolisms, preparation of virus vaccines, culture of cells to fabricate an artificial organ, production of medicines by manipulating genes of an animal cell, breeding of a plant by cell fusion.
In general, the culture of animal cells requires culture media containing nutrients such as amino acids, sugars, inorganic nutrients and vitamins, and their culture conditions are complicated. The plant cells have high viability due to their photosynthesis capabilities compared with animal cells, and thus it is easy to culture them but their proliferation rate is slow.
In the field of biotechnology which has been rapidly developed since the 1980s, the importance of the culture technology for mass-producing animal cells has been emerged as animal cell culture technology has played an important role in industrialization of biotechnology drugs.
The animal cells derived from the tissues of animals or human can be cultured by floating them in a culture medium or attaching them to a substrate. The blood-derived cells (e.g., hematopoietic stem cells) are primarily involved in suspension cells and adherent cells include the cells from the tissues such as skin, liver or lung, embryonic stem cells or mesenchyma stem cells.
The suspension cells per se enable to grow under a suspended condition in the medium while cell adhesion on the surface of solid materials is inevitable for the growth of the adherent cells. The suspension cells have been used as a main target to develop mass-production methods since it is easy to maintain the maximal cell density per unit volume for scale-up in the suspension cells.
Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell used in production of the biotechnology drugs is originally adherent cells, but can be adapted into suspension cultures. In the adherent cells adapted into the suspension cultures, there are some advantages of facilities of the scale-up and cell concentrations with higher density. However, the nutritions and oxygens are not supplied to the cells due to cell clusters generated during cell culture, and most adherent cells are not adapted in the suspension cultures in general. Therefore, an efficient method and system for mass-producing the adherent cell has not been developed yet, and thus industrialization using the adherent cells is not facile.
A predetermined space for culturing cells, a culture solution for supplying nutritions to them, and the various gases are required for cell culture. Certainly, it is also the same in the plant cells.
Particularly, the culture solutions and the various gases are introduced into the culture space and used for culturing cells, following the periodical exchange with new ones to maintain the cell tissues in a fresh condition.
Therefore, a cell culture device is essentially provided with a construction to supply and discharge the culture solutions and the various gases continuously and smoothly.
For the exchange of the culture solutions, a method utilizes a pipet to suck the culture solutions, to introduce and discharge them into the culture space. However, it is inefficient due to a possibility involving the cells in discharged culture solution and a difficulty of smooth exchange of the culture solution.
According to another conventional method, there is a method that the culture space is provided with an inlet port at one side thereof through which a predetermined amount of culture solution is introduced by an automatic or manual system, and with an outlet port at the other side thereof through which the culture solution used is discharged in the same manner.
In this method, a foreign substance could be introduced through the inlet port or the outlet port, thereby contaminating the cells. This method is also inconvenient because a user always participates in operation of the cell culture device. Furthermore, the mass cell culture is impossible due to the low efficiencies of the surface area caused from the use of the single device.
Furthermore, it is required to make a lot of time and effort for massive cell culture and it is hard to determine the collection time of the cells because of the difficulties in observing their growth status.